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Who reverted to SL after using Lion?

  • Sticking with Lion

    Votes: 615 67.1%
  • Downgraded to Snow Leopard

    Votes: 301 32.9%

  • Total voters
    916
i did, untill 10.7.1 came out.
i had previously put lion on a 8gig flash drive. ;)

i then formatted my hdd (wiped it completely) and then booted from the flash (I've still got all my original disks to my mac inc. s/l)

i tell you guys, my mac is like brand new, i love lion now, far superior than s/l. couldn't be happier. :cool:
 
I went back to SL this evening. no more unticking that daft reopen all windows on restart. No more creating duplicate docs before making temporary changes that I don't intend to save. No more gimmicks I'll never use like launchpad.

Things I'll miss:
resizing windows from any edge.
natural scrolling.
Mail client
 
Things I'll miss:
resizing windows from any edge

Yes, this was slightly useful. But in actual fact I bet you find that in a couple of days you have forgotten about it. The cleaner, functional, less gimmicky interface of SL is worth much more than additional 'improvements' (read simply 'changes') like those found in Lion.
 
Definitely. It will also help stop messing with my head as I use SL at work and I was going nuts having to remember two different ways of working.
 
Running Lion perfectly on my Dual Xeon 5150 Hackintosh!

However, I just wiped Lion on my 15" 2010 Macbook Pro back and
did a fresh install of Snow Leopard.

Lion was running much hotter than Snow Leopard.

Anyone else have similair issues with heat?
 
Wish these poll results were more like 95% positive and 5% neg.

How are users who are running 10.7.1 making out with Windows server networks/shared folders in finder? It was a bust in 10.7 for me, a primary reason for downgrading.

Just saw that 1Password 4 is going to require Lion, and I hate to see many follow suite so quickly. Hopefully many more will hold out and support both, but I have my doubts.
 
Wish these poll results were more like 95% positive and 5% neg.

How are users who are running 10.7.1 making out with Windows server networks/shared folders in finder? It was a bust in 10.7 for me, a primary reason for downgrading.

Just saw that 1Password 4 is going to require Lion, and I hate to see many follow suite so quickly. Hopefully many more will hold out and support both, but I have my doubts.

I started a thread on my problem with shared folders here.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1201338/

I hope apple fixes it soon.
 
Back to SL for me. I've always been a bit apprehensive when it comes to upgrading ever since Tiger came out. From 10.1 -> .2 and -> .3 was easy - it was all new features and performance, and basically nothing taken away.

Tiger .4 concerned me given I had old hardware at the time, but I jumped straight on the bandwagon when I went Intel.

Leopard was a hard sell, I was concerned that the silly new 3D dock etc. would slow my system down (and I was right, but thankfully you can turn it 2D. Yus!).

Snow Leopard was about the easiest decision in the world, but I instantly regretted it because it ruined Expose for me by removing the relative sizings of windows, and moving the windows around too much.

Lion... well. What a cluster****. If all you do with your Mac is use it in isolation for web browsing, mail, and the occasional video, go ahead. It's got some new eye candy (Mail, iCal, Launchpad, rubber band scrolling - yuck), and some features that dumb down some of the previously power-user features and make them more accessible (Mission Control).

But if you use your mac as a serious tool... well... Here's a list for you:
  • It's slower. (Post indexing, on both a Late 2008 Unibody 15" MBP, 2011 13" MBP)
  • The new gestures are disgusting. The thumb pinch is impossible, and the 2 finger swipe clashes with scrolling and doesn't work properly outside Safari.
  • Mission Control, while a good feature of its own accord, is not a replacement for Spaces and Expose. Why did Apple have to take these features away? What's wrong with having both Mission Control and the old Spaces/Expose? They don't seem mutually exclusive to me...
  • The new autosave document model might be "the way of the future", but when it comes to network devices and removable storage, YAY for holding on to billions of file handles and ****ing up my battery life, sleep routines, and general chi.
  • iCal peaked in 10.4. Ever since, it's been going downhill in terms of usability. This new leather feel is just another kick in the guts.
  • The multi-monitor issues. Display colour profiles not working on multimonitor systems, fullscreen apps not working on multimonitor systems, mission control being spastic on multimonitor systems... where's the quality control?!
  • There have been numerous issues with regards to upgrading from old installs. While it's always a bit of a hot topic, it's just another thorn in the side.
  • Safari 5.1 has serious issues. Memory leaks galore leaving me with no available RAM and causing my system to swap like a mofo. Extremely uncool.
  • Finder. Oh dear. "All my files" has no place on the system of anyone who knows what a file is, and this new grouped inline coverflow view is both tacky (like Coverflow itself), and extremely slow.
  • Finder's sidebar is now even less useful. Compare and contrast to Windows 7. Sigh.

I expected a lot more. I was looking forward to some of the cooler features of iOS - like saving application state, and good integration with things like GMail. I certainly didn't expect my operating system to start making decisions about which of my apps to keep open. I know this better than any algorithm ever will, Apple.

So, I reverted back to Snow Leopard (and in fact suprred me to find a Beta version of SL's Dock.app to get 10.5's expose, which I find vastly superior to SL's). It's better than SL has ever been for me - I highly recommend it.

What really irks me is the cavalier attitude Apple are now taking toward more professional users like myself. Previous editions of Mac OS X didn't really take away features; certainly not ones as prominent as Spaces and Expose - yet they are content to simply wipe the board clean with new UI tools that I believe one could empirically prove worse.

In the past, OS X felt like it was built by a team of interaction designers. People that understood how both novice and expert users work with computers, and who were able to craft a solid experience across the whole spectrum. Now, OS X feels like it's drawn by graphic designers and animators, who are concerned with flashy eye candy and have little regard to the human-computer interaction.

I love my Macbook Pro. There's nothing even remotely close to the form factor in the PC world. But I find myself longing for the utilitarianism that is Windows. (The lack of a 1440x900 panel and low-cost SSD on the now-rather-overpriced 13" Macbook Pro really isn't helping either)...

Man its so refreshing to read and see an objective Mac user on the forum.

That post/rant was bang on. I was going to add my two cents but you made mention of every point I was going to make.
 
Man its so refreshing to read and see an objective Mac user on the forum.

That post/rant was bang on. I was going to add my two cents but you made mention of every point I was going to make.

I so much mirror your post with regards to spronkey's evaluation.

I watched and looked at Window's 8 last eve, and even though I loathe going back to windows as my primary OS, I have to hand it to them for pulling a BMW (engineering wise) and pulling out all the stops. It all might not work perfectly upon release, but talk about balls to the wall with a complete new way of life-> and backwards compatibility, without compromising how people work.

But for Lion, the more I see it on my wife's computer and my son's- the more it pisses me off for being such a lazy update from Apple. I can honestly say, I hate most of what Lion brought to it's users (especially business users), and that is separate from what Lion just simply broke. You know, the fundamentals of working with an OS, not fighting it.

Save as- who ever would have thought that was wrong? That ranks up there with "your holding it wrong", IMO.
 
Snow Leopard and the MacBook Pro 2010 models were made for each other...but Lion's File Vault 2 feature allowed me to seamlessly encrypt a separate volume with sensitive company data, and as far as I know Snow Leopard's File Vault cannot do this. When reverting back to 10.6, the partition is no longer recognized, so I'm stuck with Lion unless using a third-party encryption tool, which won't provide the same seamless access.

For this reason alone I'm sticking with Lion, and with a few modifications (like adding color icons in Finder's sidebar or replacing iCal's leather look with aluminum) provided by helpful forum members, it's looking a bit more like Snow Leopard. Surely others here will be able to give us the good ole Expose and Spaces thanks to a bit of ingenuity, and with 10.7.2 around the corner some of the bugs should be eliminated.
 
Well, after going straight from Snow Leopard to 10.7.1, I have changed my opinions.

Fan doesn't go crazy anymore.
WIFI is more reliable.
Wake from deep sleep is much less tolerable, and closer to Snow Leopard.
Less heat overall.
Safari doesn't leak memory anymore.

I'm sitting with 7 tabs in Safari at the moment after a whole week of random usage (LibreOffice, Lightroom, Windows XP in Parallels, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and Flash), just closing the lid in between, and Safari has only used 500MB so far. 250MB Page In and no Page Out whatsoever.
 
I'll keep this short and to the point:

For curiosity sake, who updated to Lion but for various reasons switched back to SL?

You can post your reasons if you so choose.

I upgraded to Lion and it works just fine for me. I am staying with it and never once thought about switching back. The only time I ever switched back an OS was to go from Vista back to XP.

I don't like the less colorful Lion compared to SL, but I remedied that and used SIMBL and CandyBar to spruce Lion up. The only real complaint I have is that Mission Control replaced Spaces and Expose. I liked having the two features separate better.

But overall I am happy with Lion; I especially cannot complain too much for $29.
 
Back to SL for me. I've always been a bit apprehensive when it comes to upgrading ever since Tiger came out. From 10.1 -> .2 and -> .3 was easy - it was all new features and performance, and basically nothing taken away.

Tiger .4 concerned me given I had old hardware at the time, but I jumped straight on the bandwagon when I went Intel.

Leopard was a hard sell, I was concerned that the silly new 3D dock etc. would slow my system down (and I was right, but thankfully you can turn it 2D. Yus!).

Snow Leopard was about the easiest decision in the world, but I instantly regretted it because it ruined Expose for me by removing the relative sizings of windows, and moving the windows around too much.

Lion... well. What a cluster****. If all you do with your Mac is use it in isolation for web browsing, mail, and the occasional video, go ahead. It's got some new eye candy (Mail, iCal, Launchpad, rubber band scrolling - yuck), and some features that dumb down some of the previously power-user features and make them more accessible (Mission Control).

But if you use your mac as a serious tool... well... Here's a list for you:
  • It's slower. (Post indexing, on both a Late 2008 Unibody 15" MBP, 2011 13" MBP)
  • The new gestures are disgusting. The thumb pinch is impossible, and the 2 finger swipe clashes with scrolling and doesn't work properly outside Safari.
  • Mission Control, while a good feature of its own accord, is not a replacement for Spaces and Expose. Why did Apple have to take these features away? What's wrong with having both Mission Control and the old Spaces/Expose? They don't seem mutually exclusive to me...
  • The new autosave document model might be "the way of the future", but when it comes to network devices and removable storage, YAY for holding on to billions of file handles and ****ing up my battery life, sleep routines, and general chi.
  • iCal peaked in 10.4. Ever since, it's been going downhill in terms of usability. This new leather feel is just another kick in the guts.
  • The multi-monitor issues. Display colour profiles not working on multimonitor systems, fullscreen apps not working on multimonitor systems, mission control being spastic on multimonitor systems... where's the quality control?!
  • There have been numerous issues with regards to upgrading from old installs. While it's always a bit of a hot topic, it's just another thorn in the side.
  • Safari 5.1 has serious issues. Memory leaks galore leaving me with no available RAM and causing my system to swap like a mofo. Extremely uncool.
  • Finder. Oh dear. "All my files" has no place on the system of anyone who knows what a file is, and this new grouped inline coverflow view is both tacky (like Coverflow itself), and extremely slow.
  • Finder's sidebar is now even less useful. Compare and contrast to Windows 7. Sigh.

I expected a lot more. I was looking forward to some of the cooler features of iOS - like saving application state, and good integration with things like GMail. I certainly didn't expect my operating system to start making decisions about which of my apps to keep open. I know this better than any algorithm ever will, Apple.

So, I reverted back to Snow Leopard (and in fact suprred me to find a Beta version of SL's Dock.app to get 10.5's expose, which I find vastly superior to SL's). It's better than SL has ever been for me - I highly recommend it.

What really irks me is the cavalier attitude Apple are now taking toward more professional users like myself. Previous editions of Mac OS X didn't really take away features; certainly not ones as prominent as Spaces and Expose - yet they are content to simply wipe the board clean with new UI tools that I believe one could empirically prove worse.

In the past, OS X felt like it was built by a team of interaction designers. People that understood how both novice and expert users work with computers, and who were able to craft a solid experience across the whole spectrum. Now, OS X feels like it's drawn by graphic designers and animators, who are concerned with flashy eye candy and have little regard to the human-computer interaction.

I love my Macbook Pro. There's nothing even remotely close to the form factor in the PC world. But I find myself longing for the utilitarianism that is Windows. (The lack of a 1440x900 panel and low-cost SSD on the now-rather-overpriced 13" Macbook Pro really isn't helping either)...


Did you consider that professional mac users are no longer Apple's desired demographic?

They waited for you to bring success to the company. And by success I mean revenue. Eventually they found other products/demographics to boost the company.

Its no surprise to me that the Mac OS is moving towards iOS.
 
Well...I waited for 10.7.1 to upgrade, and I did last weekend and I am really happy.

I updated with a clean Lion install with a 3 zero pass. I have a MBP mid 2010 15" i5. The install went without an issue the only thing is that i had to wait like 5min for the install dvd to run...not a biggie.

But now my MBP is faster, and I really like the look of Lion. I have to say i did make a partition on my hd when I had SL and tested Lion 10.7.0 and since then I haven´t had any of the issues that some people are describing here...wake from sleep is actually little bit faster than SL, never missed the wifi after sleep or anything, and never had a single crash, I use an external monitor, with out issue, yes it needs some work so you can maximize your productivity but nothing to downgrade for. So for me no problems at all.

The new features are good, guys..you just have to accept the change, the moment you do that you will see that everything makes sense, stop the hate about spaces,expose and such...I found myself using features that I thought I would never use...like launchpad, i use a hot corner for launchpad and now I can access my apps with just a click and not two like SL.

I Use windows with VMware and it works perfect, Adebe CS5 with out problems as well as office 2011...I was scared about all the posts in here, but now I realize that for some is just the change and for some is actually software problems that maybe because of upgrading and not clean install maybe...or apps that are causing the crashes.

I am starting my masters in innovation and I am very happy with my workflow and productivity in lion. Mission control is great, the only bad thing is that when you have 3 or more windows of the same app open you can't see them all, so you have to guess with one is the one you want but easy fix doing app expose...yes its one more gesture but it´s fast.

So, no downgrade for me, I am apply with ion =)
 
Wow this is an interesting thread. Such mix reviews over Lion. I personally don't really have an issue with Lion. My 2011 MBP 15" refurb came with Lion preinstalled. I do miss the old Expose though and even the old dashboard. When launching a new widget it doesn't even do the ripple effect anymore. lol I also don't like the new Finder sidebar and hiding the system folders. Also when I upgraded my hard drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my drive to the new one I lost my Lion Recovery HD on the new drive. Thankfully it was still on the old drive so I made a flash drive out of it. Launchpad is alright. My only gripe is when installing a new app from the App Store is doesn't put it alphabetically in line with the rest of your apps. I have to move it manually afterwards.

In any event how would one go about "upgrading" (or "downgrading" depending on how one looks at it) from Lion to Snow Leopard? Like I said my MBP came with Lion preinstalled. I just transferred my files over from an external HD. So I have no SL disc.
 
I do miss the old Expose though and even the old dashboard. When launching a new widget it doesn't even do the ripple effect anymore.

You can get the old one back. Mission control-->uncheck "Show Dashboard as a space"

In any event how would one go about "upgrading" (or "downgrading" depending on how one looks at it) from Lion to Snow Leopard? Like I said my MBP came with Lion preinstalled. I just transferred my files over from an external HD. So I have no SL disc.

Get a SL disc, wipe and install.

Lion is flawless on my hackintosh, but I will wait till 10.7.2 to decide wether to revert to SL on my MacBook Pro. Battery life is just awful at the moment...
 
I Use windows with VMware and it works perfect, Adebe CS5 with out problems as well as office 2011...I was scared about all the posts in here, but now I realize that for some is just the change and for some is actually software problems that maybe because of upgrading and not clean install maybe...or apps that are causing the crashes.

Are you running VM 3 or 4 on Lion?
 
I've just gone back to Snow Leopard for the time being on my second machine (MacBook).

I'm not sure I'd count Lion as an upgrade in some ways... yeah, I know it is in many 'under the hood' ways, but having tested it out a bit there's a lot of thing that make my life really helpful in Snow Leopard and earlier that they've really messed up in Lion. Hopefully they'll fix some of them before too long.

Top of the list for me is how they've ruined the way I used Exposé. They could fix this if they added an option to use the old style Exposé or added an option for all-window Exposé in the hot corners again. Why ruin something that was so perfect already? It's the mac equivalent of George Lucas adding Darth Vader's "Noooooo"s in the Return of the Jedi Blu-ray as far as I'm concerned.

I also hate many of the iPad-ification aspects. I love my iPad, but that doesn't mean I want my desktop mac to behave in the same way 'for the sake of it' (which is what it feels like to me). I have no problem with Launchpad, because it's entirely optional (and good luck to anyone who wants to use it). But all the default 'resume' stuff is a pain in the backside. I want a Save As option, and I want to be able to not have to lock documents to stop them making versions and saving over files etc.

Aesthetically, I hate how the de-saturated colours a la iTunes have spread to the Finder. I think the miniaturised red/amber/green buttons look worse. I think the general squarer buttons look worse. iCal... yuck, enough said.

I guess I'm going to have to put up with a lot of this stuff in the future, especially when 10.8 comes out, and a lot of it is just personal taste, but for now it's back to Snow Leopard for me.
 
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